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Questions Amazon Should Answer About Its Cloud Strategy

In the wake of Amazon’s announcement about Eucalyptus, in which an external vendor received full blessing for a product that implements the Amazon Web Services cloud APIs, it is time for the Amazon to answer some key questions about its cloud strategy.

In my view, answering these questions is clearly in Amazon’s interests, because by doing so the company will encourage more investment in its APIs and make it safer for partners and clients worried about being locked in, being restricted in their use of APIs, or not being listened to. Here are the key questions:

Are there limits to the use of Amazon’s APIs?

How will community experience inform the evolution of Amazon’s APIs?

What is the process that will govern the evolution of the Amazon APIs?

Are there limits to the use of Amazon APIs?

The Eucalyptus announcement is an important moment because of this sentence: “As part of this agreement, AWS will support Eucalyptus as they continue to extend compatibility with AWS APIs and customer use cases.” This means that Amazon is formally blessing a product that implements its key APIs for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), its object storage service. These are the two central APIs for cloud infrastructure, although there are many more that have been defined by Amazon for various purposes.

In the past many other companies have implemented S3. Eucalyptus Walrus implements the S3 API and Basho just announced Riak Cloud Storage, an implementation based on its Riak technology. With the Eucalyptus announcement Amazon has said building a product on the EC2 and S3 APIs is okay with them and they will support the effort.

While that is great for Eucalyptus and allows the other companies that have implemented the S3 and EC2 APIs to breath a sigh of relief, it really falls far short of a clear policy. What if Google Storage changed its APIs to work exactly like S3? Would that be okay? What if EMC or Tata or Accenture created a public cloud based on EC2 and S3. Citrix’s move of the CloudStack project to the Apache Software Foundation is firmly based on the premise that it will be safe to use the Amazon APIs for private clouds. How about for public clouds?

Amazon would do itself a favor by announcing what was acceptable and what was not. Given Amazon’s reputation for secrecy, I don’t expect an announcement anytime soon.

What is odd is that in Amazon’s other businesses, it has created open environments for competition. Zappos, which Amazon owns, sells competing products with Amazon and the Amazon Marketplace vendors. Perhaps Amazon is happy to compete with itself but not eager to compete with others without some clear benefit? If that is the case, why not create an Amazon API Marketplace where competition is allowed based on some fee coming back to Amazon. Then everyone would know the rules.

Leaving this issue up in the air is fine with OpenStack, which has emerged as the platform that will be the biggest challenge to Amazon. OpenStack was founded by Rackspace and now has dozens of participating companies such as Dell and HP. Unlike Amazon’s APIs, OpenStack has a clearly defined community process, although it is not yet independent. Unlike Amazon, which is a public service, OpenStack is intended to be an infrastructure for service providers providing a public cloud. When Rackspace moves its public cloud, which is the second largest public cloud in the world, to OpenStack later this year, that will provide a major proof point for robustness and scalability.

“What will happen with Amazon’s stewardship of its APIs? ‘Nobody knows outside Amazon,’ is the answer. Amazon is one of those companies that is so secretive and so veiled. Whether or not they will allow compatibility with its APIs by other service providers hasn’t been worked out with anyone as far as we know,” said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. “I don’t think people are willing to bet their company on which way Amazon decides to go on a whim down the road.”

Citrix is a counterexample to Engate’s claim. It is betting its CloudStack business on its ability to use the Amazon APIs. As it announced that CloudStack was going to be an open source project, Citrix also declared that it was committing to using the Amazon APIs.

How will community experience inform the evolution of Amazon’s APIs?

Citrix, Eucalyptus, Basho and other companies also have teams of developers working on implementations of the Amazon APIs. What if someone in this group of developers has a good idea for an optimization of the implementation or an extension of the API? Where do they go to submit that idea? How will its value be assessed? Will there be an open discussion of the merits of ideas? As far as I can tell, Amazon doesn’t have an open collaborative design process in place that allows for input from a community of developers.

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Dan, you are entirely correct to question the details of these deals, because the devil — and I use that term advisedly — is in the details when it comes to “zombie projects.”

In traditional voodoo, “zombies” are corpses raised by a sorcerer and completely controlled by the sorcerer’s will, with no freedom of thought, choice, or action. If raised soon enough after death, they may LOOK alive, but they are…merely zombies.

Eucalyptus and CloudStack are now “zombie projects.” They are utterly (although indirectly) controlled by Amazon, through the projects’ need to maintain compatibility with Amazon’s AWS APIs. These projects may once have had independent life, but — threatened with economic death by the meteoric rise of OpenStack — they have chosen to become AWS zombies instead. As such, they have lost all freedom of thought, choice, and action. They can implement no new cloud services, other than those previously implemented by AWS. Their architectures cannot be creatively improved, lest they break compatibility with AWS. They are *zombies*, serving only Amazon’s will — and serving only Amazon’s strategic interests. Every company that comes to rely on these zombies becomes infected with their zombie virus, and thereby exposes itself to a future Cloud Zombie Apocalypse.

In creating these zombies, Amazon is stealing a page from Microsoft’s “How to Build a Monopoly” playbook (which I helped write, back in the 1990′s).

Consider one of Microsoft’s best-documented zombie-creation programs, the Windows Interface Source Environment (WISE, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Interface_Source_Environment). Microsoft used the WISE program to combat Sun’s WABI & PWI projects, which sought to create Unix-based implementations of Microsoft’s Win32 API. This API was the key to Microsoft’s vendor lock-in, and so Microsoft wanted to control any such implementations.

By licensing Windows’ source code to third parties such as Hunter, Mainsoft, and Bristol, Microsoft created “zombie projects” that out-competed Sun’s WABI & PWI. Once the tactical threat of WABI & PWI was eliminated, Microsoft slaughtered its zombies, as detailed in the records of subsequent anti-trust actions (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Technology_Inc.#1998.E2.80.932001:_Microsoft_litigation). Any apps that targeted the Win32 API could then run only on Windows…which was Microsoft’s strategic goal.

Microsoft could kill its WISE zombies because of the fine print in the WISE program’s license agreement, which — is it had been public and were closely examined — would have revealed signs of the coming Win32 Zombie Apocalypse.

At the same time, Microsoft created a zombie project on the Mac: the “Visual Studio 4 Cross-Development Edition for Macintosh,” to further establish its Win32 API as the industry’s de facto standard. This zombie enabled developers to recompile their Win32-based apps to run on the Mac. This worked so well that at least one such app won an “Eddy” award for best new Mac app one year. Indeed, it worked so well that Microsoft’s apps group burdened its license agreement with restrictions on the kinds of apps that could be created with it, to ensure that no one could use it to create an Office-killer.

Zombie-creation is just too effective a tactic NOT to use, if you’re trying to lock the entire industry into a proprietary de facto standard.

That is, of course, exactly what Amazon is doing today. It is attempting to establish its proprietary AWS API as the industry’s de facto standard, and one of its tactics is the resurrection of corpses like Eucalyptus and CloudStack as zombies. These zombies walk, and talk, and smile, and market just like living projects…but Amazon can — and will! — slaughter them as soon as they have served their tactical purpose.

Some pundits, seeing Amazon re-animate these private cloud zombies, have taken Amazon’s actions as recanting its leadership’s previous denunciation of private clouds as “false clouds.” Ha! Far from it! The zombies are a mere tactic, advancing Amazon’s strategic objective of providing the One (Public) Cloud to Rule Them All. The *sole* (not “soul,” because zombies have none) purpose of Amazon’s zombies is to slow OpenStack’s momentum. Only by preventing OpenStack from establishing a truly open cloud stack — with an open API and an open implementation, designed through an open process, openly governed — can Amazon establish the kind of Total Industry Domination that Microsoft attained in the 1990′s.

When Amazon slaughters its zombies, every company that has come to depend on the zombies will realize that they, too, have become infected with the zombie virus. They, too, will have lost their free will. Every line of code that they have written to AWS’ API will compel them to switch from the zombies’ private clouds to Amazon’s public cloud (or to a private cloud service that Amazon will, by then, have started).

For Amazon, this outcome is game, set, and match. Total Industry Domination. Monopoly. The pleasure of being overseen by the same government agencies that have thus far winked at Wall Street’s ongoing rape of the global economy.

“Monopoly.” What a lovely word — if you own it yourself!

If, on the other hand, you wish to deploy your own cloud services, or write applications that use cloud services…then becoming infected with AWS’ zombie virus should be avoided at all costs. Instead, you can inoculate yourself against the coming Cloud Zombie Apocalypse by using OpenStack — an open implementation of an open API, openly designed and openly governed — to meet your cloud computing needs.